The Social Structures of the Economy

The Social Structures of the Economy PIERRE BOURDIEU Translated by Chris Turner polity For Jerome Copyright © Pierre Bourdieu 2005 The right of Pierre Bourdieu to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publishers will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition. First published in 2005 by Polity Press Polity Press 65 Bridge Street Cambridge CB2 lUR, UK Polity Press 350 Main Street Malden, MA 02148, USA All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. ISBN: 0-7456-2539-8 ISBN: 0-7456-2540-1 (pb) A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Typeset in Sabon in llpt on 12pt by BookEns Ltd, Royston, Herts. Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International, Padstow, Cornwall Contents Introduction 1 Part I The House Market 15 1 Disposition of the Agents and the Structure of the Field of Reproduction 19 2 The State and the Construction of the Market 89 3 The Field of Local Powers 126 4 A Contract under Duress 148 Conclusion: The Foundations of Petit-Bourgeois Suffering 185 Part II Principles of an Economic Anthropology 193 Postscript: From the National to the International Field 223 Notes 233 Index 252 While economics is about how people make choice, sociology is about how they don't have any choice to make. Bertrand Russell Introduction It takes centuries of culture to produce a utilitarian such as John Stuart Mill. Henri Bergson The science called 'economics' is based on an initial act of abstraction that consists in dissociating a particular category of practices, or a particular dimension of all practice, from the social order in which all human practice is immersed. This immersion, some aspects or effects of which one finds in Karl Polanyi's notion of 'embeddedness', obliges us (even when, for the purposes of increasing knowledge, we are forced to treat it otherwise) to conceive every practice, beginning with the practice which presents itself, most obviously and in the strictest sense, as 'economic', as a 'total social fact' in Marcel Mauss's sense. The individual studies I carried out more than forty years ago in Algeria on the logic of the economy of honour and 'good faith' or on the economic and cultural determinants of practices of saving, credit or investment or, in the mid-1960s with Luc Boltanski and Jean Claude Chamboredon, on banks and their customers or, more recently, with Salah Bouhedja, Rosine Christin, Claire Givry and Monique de Saint-Martin, on the production and marketing of single family houses1 differ from economics in its commonest form in two essential respects: they attempt in each case to bring to bear all the available knowledge relating to the different dimensions of the social order - which we may list, in no particular order, as the family, the state, the school system, the trade unions, grassroots organizations, 2 Introduction etc. - and not merely knowledge relating to banking, firms and the market; and they deploy a system of concepts, developed in response to observational data, which might be presented as an alternative theory for understanding economic action: the concept of habitus, which was developed as part of an attempt to account for the practices of men and women who found themselves thrown into a strange and foreign economic cosmos imported and imposed by colonialism, with cultural equipment and dispositions - particularly economic disposi tions - acquired in a precapitalist world; the concept of cultural capital which, being elaborated and deployed at more or less the same time as Gary Becker was putting into circulation the vague and flabby notion of 'human capital' (a notion heavily laden with sociologically unacceptable assumptions), was intended to account for otherwise inexplicable differences in the academic performance of children with unequal cultural patrimonies and, more generally, in all kinds of cultural or economic practices; the concept of social capital which I had developed, from my earliest ethnological work in Kabylia or Beam, to account for residual differences, linked, broadly speaking, to the resources which can be brought together per procurationem through networks of 'relations' of various sizes and differing density, and which - often associated today with the name of James Coleman, who was responsible for launching it on the highly protected market of American sociology - is frequently used to correct the implications of the dominant model through the effect of 'social networks';2 the concept of symbolic capital, which I had to construct to explain the logic of the economy of honour and 'good faith' and which I have been able to clarify and refine in, by and for the analysis of the economy of symbolic goods, particularly of works of art; and lastly, and most importantly, the concept of fi eld, which has met with some success, in an unattributed and often rather watered-down form, in the 'New Economic Sociology'.3 The introduction of these notions is merely one aspect of a more general shift of language (marked, for example, by the substitution of the lexicon of dispositions for the language of decision-making, or of the term 'reasonable' for 'rational'), which is essential to express a view of action radically different from that which - most often implicitly - underlies neoclassical theory. In having recourse to concepts that have been developed and applied to objects as diverse as ritual practices, economic behaviours, education, art or literature, I would not wish to appear to be indulging in that kind of reductionist annexationism, ignorant of the specificities and particularities of each social microcosm, to which certain economists are increasingly addicted today, in the conviction Introduction 3 that the most general concepts of the most highly refined economic thought are adequate for the analysis, outside of any reference to the work of historians or social anthropologists, of social realities as complex as the family, intergenerational exchanges, corruption or marriage. In fact, I start out with quite the opposite conviction: because the social world is present in its entirety in every 'economic' action, we have to equip ourselves with instruments of knowledge which, far from bracketing out the multidimensionality and multi functionality of practices, enable us to construct historical models capable of accounting, with rigour and parsimony, for economic actions and institutions as they present themselves to empirical observation. Clearly, this is achieved at the expense of a prior suspension of one's ordinary commitment to the preformed notions and assumptions of common sense. As is shown by so many deductive models produced by economists, which are mere mathematical formalizations - and formularizations - of a commonsense insight, this break with ordinary practice is perhaps never so difficult as when what is to be questioned, such as the principles underlying economic practices, is inscribed in the most ordinary routines of everyday experience. I can give an idea of the labour of conversion needed to break with the primal vision of economic practices only by referring to the long string of surprised, astonished and disconcerted reactions that led me to experience quite tangibly the contingent character of so many behaviours which form part of our normal daily round: calculation of cost and profit, lending at interest, saving, credit, the creation of a reserve, investment or even work. I remember spending many an hour peppering with questions a Kabyle peasant who was trying to explain a traditional form of the loan of livestock, because it had not occurred to me that, contrary to all 'economic' reason, the lender might feel an obligation to the borrower on the grounds that the borrower was providing for the upkeep of an animal that would have had to have been fed in any case. I also remember all the tiny anecdotal observations or statistical findings I had to put together before gradually realizing that I, like everyone else, had an implicit philosophy of work, based on an equivalence between work and money: the behaviour, deemed highly scandalous, of the mason who, after a long stay in France, asked that a sum corresponding to the cost of the meal laid on for the workers at the end of the job - a meal he had refused to attend - should be added to his wages or the fact that, despite working an objectively identical number of hours or days, the peasants of the southern regions of Algeria, where emigration has had less of an impact, were more likely to say they 4 Introduction were 'working' than the Kabyles, who tended to describe themselves as unemployed or jobless. This philosophy which to me (and all those like me) seemed self-evident was something that some of those observed, in particular the Kabyles, were just discovering, wrenching themselves with enormous effort from a vision, which I found very difficult to conceive, of activity as social occupation.4 And I can also remember feeling a kind of amused stupefaction at the extraordinary story of the children of Lowestoft in Norfolk, England, who, as the French newspapers of 29 October 1959 reported, had set up a scheme of insurance against punishment which meant that for a beating the insured party received four shillings and who, in response to attempts to abuse the system, had gone so far as to add a supplementary clause to the effect that no payment would be made to those incurring punishment deliberately.

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